A quiet little spot where Rod Mollise shares his adventures and misadventures...

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Déjà vu all Over Again...

That was the
way it was last Tuesday, and that was both good and bad, muchachos. The good was
that I was able to get a look at and some pictures of our little visitor, Comet
Panstarrs, C/2011 L4. More good was that I was able to do that from the Possum
Swamp Astronomical Society’s dark site on a freaking Tuesday evening. This retirement
thing really is cool. Oh, I’ve stayed
out late for various astronomical events on work nights over the years, but
when you are facing a 4:30 a.m. wakeup, some of the fun just drains out of
whatever it is you’re up for. NO more of that.

But, yes,
there was bad, too. If you’ve been in the astro-game for four decades or more,
you must remember the notorious Comet
Kahoutek and her COSMIC WATERGATE. I went into some detail about the whole
stinking affair here, but if you don’t want
to bop over and read that right now, I can sum it up pretty quickly.

C/1973 E1
was not a terrible comet. She was
better than most of those I’d seen in the wake of Comet Ikeya Seki in 1965, but
Kahoutek wasn’t much, no avoiding that. Maybe magnitude 2 or a little better
when I saw her. That wasn’t a problem for me, but it was a problem for a lot of non-astronomers, and is what the
“Cosmic Watergate” business is about.

At first,
Kahoutek, who was discovered when she was way out in the distant reaches of the
Solar System, looked good. The media, aided and abetted by professional and
amateur astronomers, were soon touting the comet with as much hyperbole as they
could muster. We were, in fact, being told by ABC/NBC/CBS and more local
weather goobers than you could shake a stick at that Kahoutek, which would be
at its best in December of 1973 and January of 1974, would provide an incredible holiday fireworks show.

Was the
public excited? Were they ever! Everybody from the Peanuts gang to Sun Ra got
in on the act. As is not uncommon when a great comet is on its way in, there
was also a dark side; some folks, mostly a brace of crazy preachermen, decided
this comet must in fact mark the End Times.
The end of the world, that is.

The
denouement was instructive but not nearly as exciting as The End. Astronomers,
amateur and pro, had assumed too much, and you know what they say about that word. First of all, it had been
assumed Kahoutek was a virgin comet on its first trip into the inner Solar
System. Secondly, it was assumed that would make for a superior show. Thirdly,
it was assumed the comet would stay in one piece.

Not one of
those things turned out to be as expected. This was probably not Kahoutek’s
first trip around the Sun. But even if it had been, we are now aware that a
comet’s initial pass usually makes for a worse display. After surface volatiles
boil off early on, the stuff below, hard frozen as it is, just sputters. Worst
of all, as Kahoutek neared the Sun she began to break to pieces. When it was showtime, most of the
public didn’t see a trace of her. The comet was fairly bright, but low to the
horizon in all the mess down there.

I was happy
enough with the comet, but the same thing couldn’t be said for Joe and Jane
Sixpack and, especially, for the network news goobs. The public, who didn’t have
much idea what a comet should look like anyway, didn’t see what they had been
led expect: a blazing orb plowing through the winter skies. They were understandably
right put out.

The newsmen
and newswomen? They were freaking outraged.
The scientists and NASA had LIED to them. Made them look like fools. The end result was that till we
got close to Halley-time nary a peep about comets did you hear from the media.
Even spectacular—and it really was—Comet
West was ignored by them a couple of years later, and for that reason few people
outside the astronomy community saw what I believe was the comet of the
century.

“The more
things change, the more they remain the same” and I am convinced that if
there’d been a little more lead time on Panstarrs it would have been Cosmic Watergate II. Lucklily, though, there wasn’t enough time for
the TV networks and the websites to get people all stirred up. Still, that
didn’t stop some folks, including those at a prominent astronomy magazine who
should have known better, from overstating the “spectacle” inherent in this
little comet. I am proud to report that Sky
and Telescope, on the other hand, had been sounding a cautionary note for
weeks.

Anyhoo,
good, bad, or indifferent Unk is always up for viewing a hairy star, especially one
that might reach naked eye visibility, if only barely. So, on Tuesday evening 12
March I loaded up the 4Runner, Miss Van Pelt, in minimalist fashion and headed
to the club dark site.

What did I
lug out? Not much not compared to what I have with me for a Mallincam
run. There was my time-honored Canon 400D DSLR and its 18-55mm zoom for
imaging, our Manfrotto tripod to mount it on, and my netbook computer to run
the Canon with Nebulosity. Yes, I
could just have exposed for 30-seconds per frame using the camera by itself,
but not having the netbook screen for focusing is a sure path to blurry images
for me. It’s also a lot easier to tell Neb to take ten 30-second images than it
is to fool with the shutter release and self-timer.

Looked as if
it would be a fairly nice night at first:
cool but not cold, cloud-free, and dry for a change. Since it did appear to be a superior evening, I couldn’t resist also loading the C8 and CG5 for a
little piggyback imaging or maybe some visual gazing once the comet was done.

‘Course I
needed to have at least a rough idea where the comet would be. To do that, I
fired up TheSky 6. I don’t use that
planetarium program for everything, but when I’m looking for comets I almost always do. It is easy to download new orbital elements and
get your quarry onscreen in a hurry. Yep, there was Panstarrs in the west not
far from a young Moon and low in the sky, a mere 10-degrees above the horizon
just after Sunset. What I should have done then was print out the chart. I
didn’t: “Shoot, I can remember where the
little sucker is.” Ha!

The hour-long
trip to the PSAS dark site was not too bad. I should have taken rush-hour into account and allowed myself more time, but I was used to Saturday
afternoon traffic and didn’t. Still, not so bad. What appeared might be bad,
howsomeever, was the band of clouds to the south I began seeing as I neared
Tanner-Williams. “Consarned weather goobers. Do they ever get it right?” Reckon not. They had been predicting dead
clear, and there was most assuredly some mess coming in off the Gulf. Oh, well,
what would be would be.

It was after
6:30 before me and Miss Van P. rolled onto the field, so I did have to scurry a
little. Sunset would be at 7 p.m. or thereabouts, and the comet, who was reported to have a magnitude between 1 and 2 (positive), would be
available shortly thereafter. Got the tripod set up,
camera on that, USB cable to laptop, shutter control cable rigged (older Canons
require a shutter interface for long exposures). When I was done, I grabbed my 15x70
binoculars and started scanning the western horizon for the comet.

Also
scanning was an old buddy, Max, who, in addition to his camera, had brought out
a sweet 80mm ED refractor on a GEM and a 5-inch Celestron NexStar Newtonian. We
weren’t alone; we had a few non-astronomer visitors eager to see the comet. I
hoped we’d be able to show it to them, but it got darker and darker and no
matter how much I looked with my beloved Burgess 15x70 binocs, no Panstarrs did
I see.

I was
beginning to lose hope when Max spoke up, “Rod the comet is supposed to be above the Moon.” I fired back: “NO, MAX! It’s below it!” Till I had thought
for a minute and a few of my remaining brain cells fired. Max was exactly
right. TheSky had shown Panstarrs
slightly above and south of Luna.

My head on
straight, finally, and the sky a little darker, it wasn’t long before I bagged the
comet. What I saw in the Burgesses was a tiny triangle of golden light not far
from beautiful, slim Luna. I could easily make out a brilliant star-like head. Panstarrs
looked a lot like Hubble’s Variable Nebula looks in an 8-inch scope at medium
power. Without binocs, the comet was completely invisible. It would get darker
yet, so I thought we might get a glimpse of it without optical aid eventually,
though. I tossed the binoculars to our guests and headed for the camera.

Normally,
getting Nebulosity going is easy. I
was a little concerned about that on this night since this would be my
first time under the stars with the latest version of the program, Nebulosity 3. Just in case, Neb 2 was
still on the hard drive. Turned on the camera, launched Nebulosity 3, pulled down the camera selector and picked “Canon
Digic II/III/4.” And immediately got a warning message: “It doesn’t appear you have a Canon camera
connected.” Rut-roh.

I shut down
the camera, closed Nebulosity, and
fired back up with Nebulosity 2,
which worked fine. For the heck of it, I shut down 2, ran 3 again, and
dismissed the error message. Guess what? Nebulosity
3 worked fine. I’m thinking I may need to upgrade to a more recent version
of 3. I’ve posted about my problem on the Stark Labs Yahoogroup and hope to get
an answer from one of the gurus there soon.

Alarums and
excursions over, I began shooting the comet. First thing I had to decide on was
exposure. 30-seconds sounded about right. I could have put the camera on the
piggyback mount on the C8 instead of the camera tripod and gone longer, but there
wasn’t any reason to do that. It was bright enough in the west that more than
30-seconds would be overexposed, and would probably still be overexposed until
the comet was almost gone. At 30-seconds of exposure and 55mm of focal length
(equivalent to 80mm or so with 35mm film), any trailing would be completely
unnoticeable.

I focused up
with Nebulosity’s Frame and Focus
function: mashed the “go” button, and the program started the camera taking
short (1 second) exposures. It was easy to focus on the distant tree line at
infinity—I’ve learned through bitter experience never to trust the infinity
marks on a camera lens.

When the picture displayed on the Netbook screen
was as sharp as I could get it, I proceeded to set up the first sequence. At
about 15-minutes after sundown, it was still a little bright, so I went for
five exposures of 30-seconds each. Pushed the “Capture Series” button on Nebulosity to get things underway, and
wandered over to Max’s little Celestron Newtonian while the computer and camera
did their thing.

Before
looking through the Celestron I did some staring at the horizon. Every once in
a while, as the seeing changed or haze/smoke passed, I reckoned, I could see
Panstarrs naked eye. Only occasionally
was it visible as anything more than the merest smudge, and from our
location it was a marginal naked eye object at best.

In the telescope,
the comet was surprisingly good, if not great. At 50X, it was still small, but
showed off the intense golden “star” of its head and its small triangle of a
tail well. What came to mind as a description? “Mini Hale-Bopp.” To my eye, the
comet’s broad triangular tail had the same foreshortened look to it the Boppster
displayed. Comet scoped out, I got out of the way so Max could shoot some
pictures through his reflector.

Just as I
gave up the eyepiece of the Celestron, Nebulosity emitted the fanfare
sound that means “exposure’s done.” A look at the last frame showed it was now
dark enough to get serious. I modified the settings from “5 frames” to “10
frames” per sequence, keeping the exposure at 30-seconds. I changed the focal
length of the zoom from 18 to 55mm and back on each succeeding set of subframes.
Even at 55mm, it was easy to include the photogenic earth-lit Moon in the pictures.

And so it
went for the next half hour or so, till little Panstarrs sank to the point
where she was a big zero with both binoculars and cameras. Max and I did a
little fiddling around with our telescopes for a while after that, but not for
a long while. I think both of us were eager to get home and see how our comet
pictures had turned out. In this modern digital age, unlike in the film days,
you pretty much know if you got something,
but, still, you don’t know exactly what you got until the pictures are stacked
and processed.

I had the
best intentions of going right home and processing my pictures digital-darkroom
style. Alas, by the time I’d packed up my modest amount of astro-junk, motored
home to The Old Manse, and unpacked, it was getting on toward 10 p.m., time to
open the Rebel Yell locker, not crank up pea-picking Adobe Photoshop.

After
sufficient coffee the next morning, I set to work. Not that there was
much work to do with my simple wide field shots. Stack with Nebulosity—whose stacking routine works
better than anything else I have ever used—tweak curves and background color with
Neb’s processing tools, do a final touch-up with Photoshop, and I was done.

Verdict? I
was pleased with the images you see here. In retrospect, I could have used a
little more focal length to bring out Panstarrs better…but…Max was shooting
with more millimeters and so were other PSAS folks from other sites, so I was
happy to be the wide-field guy.

Posted some
of the pix on Facebook Wednesday, did a little movie about the comet with Microsoft Moviemaker (I’d shot some
video and terrestrial stills with my Fujifilm camera while Nebulosity was doing its thing), and sat back. So much for Panstarrs,
I thought. Till late that afternoon when Miss Dorothy asked if I were going out
to the site again. I hemmed and hawed till Miss D. indicated she was a little surprised
I’d let a beautifully clear sky with a comet in it pass me by.

Naturally,
that got me to thinking. Why not head to the PSAS field again? No worrying
about the shipyard the next morning, after all. But what would I do out there
and how would I do it? I could piggyback the 66mm William Optics ED refractor
on the C8 and get those longer focal length images, I reckoned. But that just
didn’t appeal. What did appeal was allowing the little visitor to strut
whatever stuff she had, to show exactly what she could do visually. The 4.5-inch
StarBlast, Yoda, with his wide field would be excellent for that. But my 100mm
binoculars would be a tad better.

The inexpensive
Zhumell 25x100s, which I reported on in this entry,
are a handful, no doubt about that, and the Pete Peterson EZ Binocular Mount
Miss Dorothy and I built for them is an even bigger handful, but no pain, no
gain. I also felt a little guilty that I hadn’t used the Zhumells, which have
excellent optics, a little more often. They had not been out of their case in
six months.

Alrighty
then. Wasn’t much trouble to snatch up the Zhumells in their nice case and toss
‘em in the back of the truck. The mount was different. Getting it downstairs
and into Miss Van Pelt was akin to wrestling with that vaunted octopus. I
removed the four counterweights and the three pipe pedestal legs and it still
wasn’t a treat, but I got ‘er done.

What else
did I take with me? That was about it. I did grab my leather flight jacket and
a ballcap since it would be both clearer and colder this evening. I thought
about brewing up a thermos of coffee, but didn’t believe I’d be onsite long
enough to drink much. I planned to be out of there and out of the cold not long
after Panstarrs set. I did print out a TheSky
chart showing the comet’s position: fool me once, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Back on the
field, job one was getting the binoc-mount set up. More octopus wrestling to
get it out of the vehicle and plenty of head-scratching as I pondered the
subject “Which pipe goes where?” Lucky for your silly old Uncle, I still had pictures
of the assembled mount on my iPhone. I’d shot those before the Chiefland
expedition linked above, and they allowed me to get the mount figured-out and
the binoculars on it in ten minutes or so.

The only
trouble I had with the Zhumells was the same trouble I have with any
binoculars, especially high power binoculars and binoviewers. My eyes
invariably have trouble merging images. For a while, anyway. After I get focus
set and interpupillary spacing correct, and my brain, such as it is, gets accustomed
to binoculars again, the images merge easily. By the time it was dark that
was just what happened with Panstarrs—who’d I’d run down as soon as possible
with the aid of the chart and the Zhumells’ red dot finder (a 25X anything must
have a finder of some kind, y’all).

How was she?
Sure did make the struggle with the binocular mount worthwhile. I had little
doubt the big glasses were getting everything out of the little comet that she
was capable of giving. In addition to the striking, bright yellow head, the
small fan of a tail began to give up detail: hints of streamers and even a “shadow”
effect along the tail’s northern edge. I was as pleased with Panstarrs as I had
been with Kahoutek on that chilly long ago night when I hunted her up from my
backyard in the university student housing ghetto.

After the
comet sank? How about Jupiter? He was nice in the Zhumells. 25X is enough to show
a little cloud-banding. What was truly remarkable? That the humble pipe mount
allowed me to view The King at all, since he was nearly at the zenith. After
that it was, natch, the sword of Orion. What was uber cool was how the big
binocs showed many of the same details in the nebula you’ll get in a telescope,
but also showed all the star-laden fields up and down the sword in the same
view.

I could have
gone on for quite a while with the Zhumells, but it was getting cold and windy.
OK, OK, fess-up time: it was also
getting spooky. The owners of the
airstrip where we do our observing had thoughtfully turned off the runway
lights (the field is closed at night) and the hangar lights, and it was dark
indeed. My PSAS buddy James, who was the only other person to make it out Wednesday
night, had had to leave a while before to get to his job, and it was getting lonelier
and darker by the minute.

Shortly
thereafter, I heard a twig break, which sounded like a rifle shot in the silence.
It was, I knew, nothing more than a possum or a raccoon. B-U-T. As my mind will
do in these circumstances, it soon transmuted Mr. Possum into The Skunk Ape. Or
maybe it was Mothman who was skulking around. That was all I needed. The
Zhumells and mount went into the truck just as fast as I could get them broken
down.

Back in the
warm and comforting confines of Chaos Manor South I sat watching a DVD of Horror of Dracula with my black cat
buddy, Thomas Aquinas, and ruminating on the latest in my long string of
comets. I sure hope Ison comes through,
because I feel a little bad about what I have heard from the non-astronomers friends
who’d been so excited about Panstarrs, “They said we could see it right after
dark, but we didn’t see a thing.”

As always, I
urge restraint concerning the potential of the next comet. With so long till
its passage, there is more than enough time for a Cosmic Watergate II to
develop. Hell, even if we urge caution, a poor showing will still give
astronomy a black eye. Fair? Nope. But sometimes life just ain’t fair, and it
is almost always not fair in the comet game, muchachos. Occasionally we do get
lucky, of course. Think “Hale-Bopp” and “Hyakatuke.” As always, cockeyed
optimist Unk will be wishing and hoping, déjà vu or no déjà vu.

If you’d like to see more pictures
from my Panstarrs expeditions, I have an album of them posted over on Facebook.
Not a Facebook friend of Unk? All you gots to do is ask…

Rod, I forgot to congratulate you last week on your retirement! I hope you are able to spend a good portion of this extra time under the stars. Please keep up the writing! There are a great number of us who look forward to your weekly blogs. Always inflormative and insightful.

There's no longer a star party in south Mississippi, but it's not far away. The Deep South Regional Star Gaze, which will be at the end of October this year, is held just over the state line near Clinton/Norwood, Mississippi. ;-)